spent a lot of time making the sea feel wet. fixed tile collision so i can have floating islands (but the island generator doesn’t generate them very well yet). made a few animals… next, more animals! and plants! and sound!

so yeah i learnt how to do cool fake lighting.. fixed lots of bugs (some of which date all the way back to FMN1’s code from feb 2011! :D).. last night i made the ripple shader actually ripple.. tonight i put it on the lighting layer to see what that’d look like…AQUA ZONE!

sticking to blurry little vine videos until it’s worth making a longer vid for youtube. there’s not much Game Progression Flow Thing yet. every FMN screenshot/video starts to look the same after awhile but i may as well post em since i have this website & all..!

games that i make in dreams always have this cool hallucinatory look to them, all translucent and fluid and skewedly symmetrical broken mirrors, the pieces singing to each other.. like they’re running on something alive and amorphous.. still crystalline but gone all melty. your computer was lying smashed on a creek bed for a thousand years and now some mutated platypus is running a sun dappled arcade made of whorls & eddies washing over really lovely pebbles of CRT glass. >_>

ANYWAYS so it’s obviously not going to reach actually-dreaming levels of dreaminess but i’m pretty happy with Forget-Me-Not Vita’s look! (there isn’t too much more to see since my last Vine video of it, just felt like blogging a blog)

it doesn’t look like much but i’ve spent heaps of time figuring out how to make the vita hardware do this at native resolution, sixty frames a second. various different layers of stuff, rendered into each other multiple times in different orders, assembled, cut up, assembled again and splatted on the screen, and it’s approaching the kind of look i was dreaming of a couple years ago. yay!

i haven’t started tweaking the shaders and colours (and barely any of the critters are in yet) – it just does One Thing so far – but the code’s in place to allow a dynamic range of oddness from super subtle got-a-slight-fever to the occasional full feedback explosion divine moment of truth. it’s not meant to be a particularly trippy game, i just want it to feel alive. and nothing says LIFE like a mob of weird things which wobble and eat each other and get out of control, and an environment whose mood shifts in reaction.

oh yeah i made a cool little menu and textbox system.. something i usually leave til the last minute and end up hating. FMN doesn’t need many menus (or does it!?) but i do like cute and responsive UIs :o)

now i’m moving on to putting together the structure/arc of the game (it will have one, unlike FMN1). might post again about some of the new stuff i’m planning when i get further along.

got nice solid platform collision (with slopes!) working, before becoming distracted by other things… no more can cats fly through walls.

my vague plan for this game is:
– make in-game level editor
– make lots of levels. no procedural generation!
– lay all the levels out in a nonlinear world map type structure which you can traverse at will
– keep it quite simple

still don’t know what exactly you do in the game yet. i’d like to make it some kind of exploration arcade game maybe..

i’m relaxing this weekend making a simple little arcadey platformer. don’t know what it is yet. i’ve been vaguely trying to make things like this for years but never been able to get them working right..